Tag: pharmaceutical

Diving for Cures

  • Researchers are hoping to find cures underwater in corals and sponges. (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

Making medicine from things
found in nature isn’t a new
idea. Think, aspirin – which
originally came from the bark
of willow trees. Now drugs
derived from ocean animals are
slowly making their way onto
shelves. Samara Freemark talks to a researcher
who helps get them there:

Transcript

Making medicine from things
found in nature isn’t a new
idea. Think, aspirin – which
originally came from the bark
of willow trees. Now drugs
derived from ocean animals are
slowly making their way onto
shelves. Samara Freemark talks to a researcher
who helps get them there:

Mark Slattery is trying to find a cure for cancer. Slattery is a pharmacology professor at the University of Mississippi. But he doesn’t really spend much time in the lab. Instead, he’s usually in a wetsuit, scuba diving off the coasts of places like Guam and Antarctica.

He’s taking samples from tens of thousands of corals and sponges. He’s looking for that one special species that might make a chemical that could cure disease. He calls it, ‘diving for cures.’

“In many ways, it’s like going out and playing your super lotto or whatever. You pick your eight numbers and you see if you hit or not.”

The idea is pretty simple. A third of the medicines on shelves today were derived from plants and animals that live on land. So ocean researchers got to thinking that the organisms they studied probably also produced a lot of useful chemicals.

Take corals and sponges. They can’t run away from predators, so instead they squirt out chemicals that poison the fish that try to take a bite out of them. Marc Slattery says those toxins are bad for the fish – but they could be good for people.

“Those particular compounds that tell a fish “not today” are the same ones that might tell the AIDS virus “you can’t replicate” or tell a cancer cell “you’re dead” or those kinds of things.”

So Slattery and other researchers like him clip off bits of sponges and corals. When they get back to the lab they extract the chemicals, which is a nice way of saying…

“Stick it in a blender with methanol and ethyl acetate and hexanes and all those sorts of things you used in organic chemistry lab, and you throw away the dead sponge, and the tarry residue that’s left is sort of the biochemistry that came out of that sponge.”

“So you make a sponge smoothie?”

“Exactly.”

Once they’ve extracted the chemicals, researchers test to see if they have any human application. If a compound looks promising, it moves on to clinical trials. Those trials can take decades, which is why ocean-derived drugs are only now starting to hit the market. So far only two have been approved for use in the United States: a painkiller, and a cancer drug marketed by Johnson and Johnson.

I wondered how ocean conservationists felt about diving for cures. So I called up Sandra Brooke. She studies corals at the Marine Conservation Biology Institute. Brooke says she does worry that diving for cures could lead to over-harvesting.

“Once something becomes valuable to people, there’s a resistance to closing access to it. It becomes harder to regulate it.”

But she says corals are under much greater and much more immediate threats. The biggest culprit is industrial trawling. That’s when fisherman scrape reefs off the ocean floor so they can get to the fish.

“It’s just like the clear cutting of the forest, but on a much vaster scale. They are deliberately mowing down these deepwater coral ecosystems that are thousands and thousands of years old – some of the oldest animals ever measured. And that’s not going to come back – not in our lifetimes, not in many lifetimes.”

There’s also the fact that oceans are changing as the climate does. Those changes mean corals are becoming weaker. Marc Slattery thinks he might be seeing that in a Pacific reef he’s been studying for fifteen years.

“When we went back and started looking at it, we noticed that there was a change in the chemistry through time. As things have heated up on the reefs, there’s a physiological effect that has cascaded down into their ability to produce the chemistry we’re used to seeing. Early on it was so apparent, it was always there, and now they seem to be able to produce less of it.”

That’s means that today the cure for cancer might be out there in some coral reef, but it could be gone tomorrow.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Cloning Plant Species for the Future

  • Biologists plant cloned Monkshood starts. (Photo by Julie Grant)

Lots of people worry about the extinction of animal species, but plant conservationists say plants are even more threatened than animals. People are starting to go to great lengths to protect them.
There are banks set up to save seeds and large-scale efforts to educate people about threats to plants. Researchers, park biologists, and others have teamed up in one state to save a type of wildflower. Julie Grant
reports:

Transcript

Lots of people worry about the extinction of animal species. But plant conservationists
say plants are even more threatened than animals. People are starting to go to great
lengths to protect them. There are banks set up to save seeds and large-scale efforts to
educate people about threats to plants. Researchers, park biologists, and others have
teamed up in one state to save a type of wildflower. Julie Grant reports:


Biologist Mike Johnson is trying to walk carefully. He’s balancing a tray of plastic
containers while hiking down damp, sun-dappled cliffs. Each container holds a few starts
of northern monkshood. These wildflowers have only been found in four states.
Johnson is in Gorge Park, one of only three places in Ohio where monkshood have been
found:


“And, in Gorge Metropark they only exist in one area, and that makes them very
vulnerable to both natural and human induced impacts.”


People who walked the Gorge in the 1980s remember seeing thousands of the blue-
hooded wildflowers. But by 2000, there were only 13 of the plants left here. Johnson
says they were being killed by the salt used to melt ice and snow on a recently built
highway. People dug a ditch to divert melted salt that washed off the road. The monkshood have
done a little better since then. There’s now a stand with 190 of them, but
conservationists want to make sure this wildflower survives long term. Today Johnson is
planting new monkshood starts on the opposite side of the River, away from the
highway:


“So the goal is to establish satellite populations throughout the Gorge Metropark, so if
for some reason they were to die out in one area, they wouldn’t die out in the park
altogether.”


You might think that Johnson and other plant people could just collect seeds from the
surviving monkshood in order to grow new plants, but the director of conservation at
the Holden Arboretum says seeds aren’t reliable enough. They often don’t grow into
plants. Brian Parsons says that when the monkshood population started to decline, the
Arboretum started looking for new ways to preserve the plant’s genetic diversity:


“The only true way to capture that is to clone the plants, so we made the recommendation
to investigate cloning because scientific literature indicated that plant potentially had the
capacity to respond to that type of propogation.”


The Cincinnati Zoo plant research program specializes in plant cloning. So it cloned the
monkshood that Mike Johnson and another biologist are planting today.


Down in the gorge, they use a trowel to dig around in the rocky soil. They’re looking for
planting conditions that will give the monkshood the best chance to survive:


“Literally, that, over there is perfect. There’s not full sunlight. The trees above are
filtering out a lot of it. Just a little sunlight is getting down to the bottom and you’ve got
cool, clear springs. And even though we have all the surrounding development, there are
still springs in the gorge that are fairly uncontaminated from urban runoff and pollution.”


Water drips onto the biologists from the overhanging rock formations. They plant a
couple of monkshoods right in the crevices of the rocks. The leaves are reminiscent of a
buttercup. They are in the same family of plants. They’re not in bloom now. In the
spring, the delicate blue flowers remind some people of a religious hood. That’s how the
plant got its name.


Once Johnson puts these small monkshood starts in the soil, it’s hard to distinguish them
from the other ground-cover. That’s not a bad thing. Johnson says it’s best if people don’t
know exactly where to find the rare northern monkshood:


Grant: “You think people would poach them or something?”


Johnson: “Yeah. Yeah. It’s possible. We don’t generally try to advertise their location.
Anytime something’s rare, it’s valuable and somebody might want to take it.”


Plant specialists believe each plant species provides a purpose in nature, and might hold
some promise for pharmaceuticals or some other use. They’re just not sure yet what
people can learn from the northern monkshood. That’s why they want to make sure it
survives.


For the Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Interview With Mark Plotkin

  • Plotkin is the president of the Amazon Conservation Team, a group working to preserve the cultures and species in the rainforests of Central and South America.

Last year Time magazine named researcher Mark Plotkin an
environmental "Hero for the Planet." Plotkin has spent nearly 20 years
in
the rain forests of Central and South America, and is working to save
not
only the forests, but also the tribes who live there. He’s just
finished a
new book entitled "Medicine Quest: In Search of Nature’s Healing
Secrets." In it he argues that many ancient tribes of the forests
understand
plants better than botanists. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester
Graham recently talked with Plotkin and asked about his work:

Related Links

New Research in Drug Development

Scientists say they might have found a more efficient way to produce drugs
and chemicals from plants. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham
reports… it might reduce the cost of developing drugs: